Dr. Haomin Gong (Lingnan University)

Nation is not natural. Nor is nature, as Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature, 2009) and many others remind us. In this paper, I investigate the complex relationship between nation and nature featured in cinematic representations in socialist and postsocialist China. I am particularly interested in the role that ethnic minorities play in this relationship. Four major instances will be singled out for close examination: 1) from landscape to class struggle, 2) building a socialist laboring subject through interacting with nature; 3) entering explicitly environmental themes; and 4) new nationalist eco-ethnicity. By exploring the ways in which nature was (re)imagined and (re)configured in the process of Chinese nation-building, a process that particularly involves an ideologically-charged manipulation of ethnicity, I intend to map out an intricate trajectory in which ethnicity has shaped unique features of Chinese ecocinema.